33: Thinking About Climate Change with Paul Hoggett

Paul brings deep insights into climate change drawing on
psycho-social thinking. This conversation explores climate
anxiety, climate denial and climate delay, and how we as
‘moderns’ find it very difficult to escape deeply embedded ideas
that entrap us. Paul relates this thinking back to our founding
myths from Judeo-Christianity that throws humanity outside of the
Edenic garden, and outside of nature, and is always looking for
external salvation.  He reflects that “Us moderns live in a
kind of cocoon, continuing in our everyday routines, of living in
our comforts, which means that we are able to live in this world,
where because of mass media and now social media we know about
all these terrible things going on and yet somehow or other
remain unaffected”


The conversation moves to how to engage with climate change and
the anxieties it raises, and at the same time retain ‘radical
hope’.  Finally Simon and Paul reflect with caution, 
on some real changes taking place.



Bio: Paul Hoggett is a psychoanalytic
psychotherapist and is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at
UWE, Bristol where, with Simon Clarke, he was a Director of the
Centre for Psycho-Social Studies. In 2000, with Larry Gould, he
was founding editor of the journal Organisational and Social
Dynamics, a forum for those working within the Tavistock Group
Relations tradition. In 2012, with Adrian Tait, he founded the
Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) and was its first chair. He
recently edited a collection of CPA research papers, Climate
Psychology: On Indifference to Disaster (2019, Palgrave
Macmillan). Previous books have included Politics, Identity and
Emotion (2009, Paradigm) and Partisans in an Uncertain World
(1992, Free Association Books).